SPENCER: McQueary gets off easily in Freeh Report

In this Jan. 25, 2012 file photo, former Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary arrives to the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center on the Penn State campus for the funeral service of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno in State College, Pa. Former FBI director Louis Freeh, who led a Penn State-funded investigation into the university's handling of molestation allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, is scheduled to release his highly anticipated report Thursday, July 12, 2012. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma, File)

It is being hailed as a scorching indictment of Penn State and specifically four senior administrators for their failure to act to protect children. And scorching it is.

The report makes a strong case that not nearly enough was done to stop Jerry Sandusky from sexually abusing children at Penn State and it blames four people specifically -- Gary Schultz, Tim Curley, Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno.

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"Our most saddening and sobering finding," wrote Louis Freeh, "is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State. The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized. Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky's victims until after Sandusky's arrest."

In reference to the now infamous incident allegedly witnessed by assistant coach wannabe Mike McQueary, the report says of Paterno and company, "Their callous and shocking disregard for child victims was underscored by the Grand Jury, which noted in its November 4, 2011 presentment that there was no attempt to investigate, to identify Victim 2 or to protect that child or others from similar conduct, except as related to preventing its reoccurrence on University property."

And yet, for all the outrage Freeh and his investigators manage to muster for Paterno and company for not caring about the safety of children, they don't have a single bad word to say about Mr. McQueary and his behavior that fateful night.

He was, after all, the man who claimed to have witnessed a 10-year-old boy being anally raped in the shower by Jerry Sandusky. And what did McQueary do? According to his own testimony he slammed a locker door and fled the scene. He left a 10-year-old boy behind in the company of the man who just raped him.

Callous? Shocking? Not as expressed by Team Freeh.

Here was one of the few adults who claims he actually witnessed Sandusky raping a child and what does he do to rescue the child? Nothing. And he gets a complete pass in the Freeh report.

McQueary was not even interviewed by Freeh's investigators. The state AG's office didn't want their star witness against Curley and Schultz in its upcoming perjury trial quizzed by Penn State's hired guns.

Nevertheless, for the sake of his case against Paterno, Schultz, Curley and Spanier, Freeh appears to have simply accepted McQueary's story as fact. Not so, the jury determined at Jerry Sandusky's criminal trial. Those 12 men and women were more skeptical. Of all the molestation charges thrown at Sandusky, one of the few that didn't stick was the shower-room rape that McQueary claimed to have witnessed.

For all along there have been serious questions raised about what McQueary actually told Paterno -- and later Schultz and Curley -- concerning what he actually saw going on in the shower that night.

Instead of calling the police he called his father, then went to his house, where they pow-wowed with a family friend.

Questions have even been raised about what he told his father's boss, Dr. Jonathan Dranov, who testified at Sandusky's trial. Under oath, Dr. Jon more than suggested that McQueary was vague and evasive about what he actually saw going on between Sandusky and the boy.

If he was vague with his father and Dranov, he might have been even more vague with Paterno. In fact, he admits he was. Nevertheless, Paterno certainly got the idea that what McQueary saw might have been sexual in nature. He said as much to investigators and the grand jury.

But there's a big difference between knowing something because you saw it happen with your own eyes and being told something happened by somebody else. In the second case, certainty becomes almost impossible and doubt has a way of creeping in.

Freeh makes much of the fact that Paterno et al. knew that there had been a previous allegation against Sandusky in 1998. But what he doesn't stress is that that allegation was pretty thoroughly investigated by professionals and dismissed. At the time, Sandusky's behavior was thought weird and inappropriate. But not criminal.

There is no doubt Paterno and the others could have -- and should have -- done more to see to it that Sandusky's suspicious behavior was investigated. But it was McQueary who -- at least later -- actually claimed to have caught Sandusky in the act.

In all those 14 years of Sandusky's career as a serial molester, nobody had more power to stop him and bring him to justice than Mike McQueary. And what did he do? He ran away from that chance. In so doing he abdicated his duty as a grown man to help a child in immediate and ongoing danger.

McQueary's failure of resolve and character doesn't absolve Paterno, Spanier, Curley or Schultz of their own lapses. But Freeh's failure to recognize or comment on it makes his report at best incomplete and at worst, a willful -- maybe even callous -- disregard for the whole truth.

At his press conference, Freeh mentioned a school janitor who also witnessed Sandusky molesting a boy in the shower and did nothing to intervene. Freeh blamed the "culture of fear" at the university for preventing the janitor from reporting it.

Horsecrap!

I say that janitor is as guilty as McQueary for not meeting his obligation to rescue that child. He's as guilty as you or I would be if we didn't step up and do what's right. Not reporting it later just compounds that woeful failure.

On page 68 of the report, it states: "No record or communication indicates that McQueary or Paterno made any effort to determine the identity of the child in the shower or whether the child had been harmed."

The difference, of course, is that McQueary (if his story can be believed) had seen with his own two eyes a child being harmed right in front of him. Determine? What was there for McQueary to determine? Other than which way to run.

If Paterno and the others are guilty of a dereliction of their duty to protect children, McQueary is guilty of much, much worse.

But you won't read that in the Freeh report. And that makes it wretchedly incomplete.